Why People Hated Me So Much Because of My Bitcoin Ads

In August of 2017, when Bitcoin was at $3,500, I went on CNBC and said Bitcoin would be worth $1 million.

Then I spent about $60 million on ads. (Note: I don’t know the exact number. This is a total guess.)

Bitcoin today is at $11,000. It’s not at $1 million. Not yet (see below).  And it’s the best-performing asset class of 2019.

A lot of people started to hate me after August 2017.

Every single day I still get hate mail of some sort or other from both friends and strangers about how disgusted they are with me because of “cryptocurrencies.”

I spiraled into a depression that was unbearable. Strangers hated me, friends hated me, people I admired were trashing me everywhere.

One time I was so upset, I posted my phone number on Twitter and said, “If anyone has a problem with me, call me.”

For the next 12 hours I spoke to people from all over the world. None of those people ever trashed me again. But it was only a handful of people.

I think there were many reasons people didn’t like me after I started getting involved in Bitcoin.

And, in some cases, they might have been right.

—

A) IN EARLY 2013 I TRASHED BITCOIN

I called it a scam.

So people thought I had changed my mind just to make some quick money.

However, in 2013, a month after I had called it a scam, I learned more.

A friend of mine, Naval Ravikant, visited town and he was generous with his time. He answered probably over 200 questions I had about Bitcoin.

He convinced me. And then I read thousands of additional articles. And then I looked at the code for Bitcoin.

In fact, in May 2013, a month before I was planning on releasing my book Choose Yourself on Amazon, I created my own “Bitcoin-only” store to sell my book.

Maybe it was the first online Bitcoin store ever created.

After I created the store, I sold about 100 copies of my book for 0.1 Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was about $60, so I sold each copy for $6. Now 0.1 Bitcoin is $1,100.

I went on CNBC to discuss “the first Bitcoin-only store.” Herb Greenberg said to me, “Did you just do this for the publicity for your book?”

I answered, “Well, I’m on national TV. So it worked!”

Which was maybe an arrogant way to answer. But it was the truth.

To market a book, you need to use your beliefs to create events that will attract attention to your ideas.

Even in 2013, I called Bitcoin the “Choose Yourself currency.”

But, although everyone brings up how I called Bitcoin a scam in early 2013, the video of me supporting Bitcoin in May 2013 exists.

I changed my mind once I understood more about Bitcoin.

—

B) WHY DID I CHARGE FOR A NEWSLETTER?

99.99% of what I write is for free.

I’ve been writing material for free since 2002. Almost every article I write can be read for free.

I often write books and offer them for free. Or charge as little as I possibly can.

In 2017, as Bitcoin was moving up, I saw that many of my readers were discussing cryptocurrencies.

In particular, they were discussing cryptocurrencies that I was convinced were a scam.

How would I get my voice to rise above all the voices that I truly considered to be scams?

I wrote some free articles explaining my beliefs about cryptocurrencies. but I wanted to do more.

I hired people to help me.

I identified currencies that I felt were not scams.

And I advertised my advice. I worked with a very good marketing company that had all the resources to run a newsletter, customer service, marketing, etc. All of this costs money, And still does.

I like to write for free. But in this case I had to pay people and use resources beyond what I was able to afford.

So although I still wrote a lot about cryptocurrencies for free, I had to charge for some of it.

—

C) “YOU WERE PUMPING SHITCOINS!”

I still get this. People say, “Weren’t you pump-and-dumping shitcoins?”

The answer: NO. Never. Absolutely not. In fact, the opposite.

I went on CNBC in 2017 and I said, “About 95% of the cryptocurrencies out there are scams.”

Since that point, the cryptocurrency portfolio I recommend has about 12 currencies. ZERO of them have been scams. All solve huge huge problems in the currency space.

About 80% of the cryptocurrencies that were out there when I was making my prediction on CNBC have gone to zero, as predicted. Most of them were scams or had no real problems they solved.

I still think 95% will go to zero. My goal is to find the ones that won’t. None of the ones I’ve recommended are scams.

I have not personally sold a single coin from my personal portfolio.

—

D) “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? WHY NOW?”

Even people close to me questioned my credentials.

They thought because I wasn’t living in Silicon Valley and I wasn’t involved in making any cryptocurrencies then I should not have a voice.

I disagreed.

I have been a professional money manager for almost 20 years now.

I have also been a software developer for almost 35 years.

I’ve started software companies, hedge funds, and invested in many software companies.

I’ve also written books about many types of investing strategies.

So not only did I understand cryptocurrencies from a very technical perspective (I could read the code) but from a money management and economics perspective.

Many of the people criticizing me had only expertise in software or only money management but not both. I had both.

—

E) I WANTED MAINSTREAM AMERICA TO UNDERSTAND BITCOIN

A lot of the hate that I got came from people who were from Silicon Valley.

Whenever they publicly explained Bitcoin they would go into “cryptography” and “blockchain” and “mining.”

All of this is interesting, but failed to explain to regular people what Bitcoin was about.

This is like saying, “Amazon is a software application built on top of the TCP/IP protocol,” instead of saying, “Amazon is a store.”

The internet got widespread adoption when everyone understood it. Not just tech people.

Eventually Bitcoin won’t be called a “cryptocurrency.” It will be called a “currency.”

—

E1) HOW I EXPLAINED BITCOIN AND OTHER DIGITAL CURRENCIES

I had two viewpoints. And in this explanation I did the math on why I think Bitcoin will go as high, or higher, than I predicted.

EVOLUTION: Nobody knows the true origin of money.

Was it barter? Was it some unit of accounting for debts?

I simplified it to this:

Money went from…

Barter > Precious metals > Paper money backed by precious metals > Fiat money (money backed by a government)

Each form of money solved the problems of the prior form.

For instance, a barter system is too complicated. How much grain should a pair of shoes cost? How much corn could I get for a shirt that I sew?

This was solved by precious metals, which were hard to mine and easier to transport and come up with exchange rates.

But with metals, it was hard to transport long distances. And it was random where there was gold and silver, and this would lead to wars (I am simplifying).

So paper money backed by resources was created.

But again, why should the spending of a country be limited by a country’s closeness to a gold mine?

So fiat paper money was created to allow for a growing country to pay for that growth.

But paper money has its limitations: centralized control (a central bank), which created the potential for human error (as almost happened in the bank bailout in 2009).

Paper money transferred electronically has too many fees.

Imagine transferring money from your bank to a friend in China.

Your local bank > Your local reserve bank > Federal Reserve > SWIFT wiring system > China’s Central Bank > local reserve bank > local bank

Each step of the way there are:

• fees
• loss of privacy
• potential for human error
• time (ever send a wire and before it settles in the other account you wonder, “Where in the currency ether is my money?”)

Cryptocurrencies solve this problem. And since each form of money eventually takes over 100% of the prior form, I felt (and still feel) this will happen as cryptocurrencies, in some way, replaces regular currencies.

Demand for money is $150 trillion (the amount of money on the planet).

Supply of Bitcoin is about $150 billion.

The math then suggests a potential 1,000x increase in the price of Bitcoin, since supply of Bitcoin is fixed (as opposed to the supply of paper money).

That was my first argument.

For a good resource on understanding how evolution works in various industries, read Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything. I was applying his ideas on evolution to the industry of currency.

THEISM > HUMANISM > DATAISM

My second argument was similar to Yuval Harari’s theory from his book Homo Deus that every industry goes through three phases: theism, humanism, dataism.

For instance, medicine.

Theism: If you were sick 1,000 years ago, you prayed to your shaman or god or whatever in hopes of getting better.

Humanism: 100 years ago you would go to a doctor.

Dataism: now you get blood work, even DNA work, and a doctor interprets that data (for now) and recommends treatment, which may include robotic surgery or eventually personalized medicine recommended by A.I. analyzing your genome.

Currency is the same.

Simplified: “In God We Trust” > “In George Washington We Trust” > “In Data We Trust” 

Cryptocurrencies solve the basic problems of fiat money (or paper money): privacy issues, fee issues, human error problems, supply and demand issues, forgery, and even the basics of contract law and problems with it.

I felt that explaining everything in layman terms that were easy to understand would increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies and solve many societal problems.

Bitcoin doesn’t solve all of the problems. So I picked out a portfolio of cryptocurrencies that solve many of the problems. And it changes as more currencies are developed.

I wanted to help people: avoid scams, find the currencies (based on my technical expertise and investment expertise) that had the most potential for replacing all or part of fiat money.

This is how I explain: Who am I? Why am I? Why now?

—

F) “YOUR ADS ARE SLIMY!!!!”

I agree. The ads were outrageous.

Alain de Botton has an excellent video: NICE GUYS NEED TO USE MACHIAVELLIAN TACTICS.

His point is that if there are 10 people trying to get attention, the nice guy (saying “please listen to me”) will get no attention and the scams will get the most attention.

So the nice guy, if he truly believes in the integrity of what he or she is offering, must use the same tactics.

I am not an internet marketer and have no experience as one.

But we live in an attention-glutted economy. And internet marketers know how to get people to pay attention.

One time I wrote an ad myself and ran it side by side an ad created by an internet marketer.

Despite my 30 years of writing convincingly, and despite the horrible sliminess of the other ad, the ad created by the internet marketer was clicked on 10 times as much as mine.

It was successful and mine wasn’t.

My technique was not effective if I wanted to get an important message across to as many people as possible.

So I decided to go full force on internet marketing because I believed and still believe in what I am saying about cryptocurrencies.

—

G) “YOU WERE EVERYWHERE! I HATE SEEING YOUR FACE!”

People would say, “I hope I never see that guy’s face again.”

I get it. I’m the one who has to look at it every day in the mirror.

Most of the ads had my face on them. One ad had my face with Bitcoins in my eyes and fire behind my head. It felt vaguely anti-semitic to me.

And yet that was the ad that got the most people to click.

I hated looking at it. The ugliest picture of me ever (and that says a lot) was the one that was most successful.

But people didn’t buy because they clicked. The ads took them to videos I did explaining my opinions on why I felt cryptocurrencies were going to be enormous.

People got, for free, videos where I explained all my beliefs on cryptocurrencies. They got a free six-video class on how to invest in cryptocurrencies. The also got a free book that I wrote called Crypto 101.

I do not recommending trading in and out of cryptocurrencies. For me, this is a worldwide change in how we view money.

Other newsletters were suggesting day trading cryptocurrencies. I was 100% against this.

I was also 100% against many of the slimy “shitcoins” out there that I felt were going to zero and I was clear on this.

Because I explained in layman’s terms, my ads were more successful than other people’s ads.

Because I offered a product I believed in, and still do, my ads were much more successful than all other ads.

I don’t know how much the marketing company spent.

But it was probably close to $60 million or even much more. They didn’t spend this because they were trying to beat everyone else with more money.

The marketing company only spent that money because they saw that every $1 spent was earning greater than $1 because people were resonating with the message I had.

The only reason my newsletter was selling better than the other 5,000 out there was because I was the only one explaining cryptocurrencies in a way people could relate to and make sense of.

—

H) “THE ADS LIED. THEY SAID YOU WERE AN ‘ECCENTRIC GENIUS’ AND OTHER SLIMY THINGS.”

I agree. I was embarrassed about the ads. I don’t consider myself an eccentric genius.

But I had a viewpoint that I wanted people to listen to.

And my mother does think I am eccentric.

—

I) “CRYPTO IS A SCAM, SO YOU ARE ALSO!”

Crypto is definitely not a scam. Digital currencies are coming, whether we like it or not.

The Facebook digital currency will be the first global currency in history.

And almost every bank and major retail store is using (or developing) some form of cryptocurrency.

Up from ZERO when I started writing about Bitcoin.

Lately, the global political landscape has become more nationalistic.

But the internet itself has connected the world in ways we never would have expected 20 years ago.

And now, with cryptocurrency, the world of transactions will be truly global, instead of going through eight banks (for country-to country-transactions), dealing with privacy issues, exorbitant fees, trade/finance/legal issues, etc.

Many people called me a “scam” because: 1) I was selling, 2) they thought crypto was a scam, and 3) they though I was “pumping shitcoins” for personal profit.

I was selling. But stores are not scams. You simply don’t have to buy.

Crypto is not a scam.

And I never ever sold a single coin that was — nor have any of the coins recommended in my newsletter been — “shitcoins,” despite the fact that now 80% of coins have disappeared, something I predicted on CNBC almost two years ago.

—

J) “YOU GUARANTEED HUGE RETURNS. ONLY SCAMS DO THAT.”

I did guarantee huge returns. My math is explained above. I very much believe that math.

But I also made a financial guarantee: If someone wasn’t satisfied, they could get another year for free.

And I am a firm believer that huge returns are coming. Bitcoin is up more than any other financial asset in 2019.

And when I first started this product (in August 2017 after I was on CNBC), Bitcoin was at $3,500. Now it’s almost 3x higher.

—

Every day I still get hate mail. It has not stopped for even one day in the past 20 months.

People tell me, “Blow it off. Don’t care. You’ve helped 100x more people through your writings.”

But I cared.

—

Before I started the crypto ads I was approached by several people to do a “crypto hedge fund.” I don’t know if I would have made more money if I started a hedge fund.

It certainly would have been more private.

And typically a new hedge fund in a new financial industry makes an enormous amount of money.

I was in that business before for many years.

I didn’t want to just help a handful of already wealthy investors.

It sounds like a lie or cliché when I say this: but making more money is not the only reason to do things.

Else, believe me, I would not have bought part of a comedy club. I would not spend most of my days writing or doing podcasts.

I wanted to express my opinions, hire resources to help me, and get my opinions on this important new innovation out to as many people as possible.

I like doing that.

I’ve experienced a lot of hate for unpopular positions in the past. When I said nobody should buy a house, or not to send your kids to college, or that no war is justified.

Crypto was about 100 times that. It was incredible. And the positive response was also incredible.

But it’s natural to focus on the negative. We focus on the negative for evolutionary reasons.

If a bush shakes, our ancestors would RUN rather than wait to see whether it was just the wind, or a lion about to jump. Better to just assume the worst and run.

Which is why negativity is painful. Which is why mainstream media preys on our fears rather than our hopes. Which is why people love to hate rather than love.

I have greatly appreciated all of the amazing things that have happened to me this past year.

In my professional life (my podcast is bigger than ever, my investments in companies helping millions of people), in the ways I’ve been blessed to help people, and in my personal life (getting married and bringing three more children into my life).

I don’t really regret anything that happened.

I do wonder why many people lied about me without reading a single thing I was saying.

I do wonder why the ad with Bitcoins in my eyes and fire behind me and the ugliest picture of me ever was the most successful.

Why did people click on that one?

—

[Happy to answer any questions in the comments.]

The post Why People Hated Me So Much Because of My Bitcoin Ads appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher https://ift.tt/31V8QnO via website design phoenix

What They Forgot to Tell You About Having Children

Having children is awful. “Oh, it’s the most precious experience there is!”

Stop the B.S.

A) A one-foot-tall brand new U.S. citizen suddenly moves into your house and you are FORCED to child-proof every object in your life.

B) This one-foot-tall U.S. citizen (and what did she even do to deserve that passport?) doesn’t speak English and yet DEMANDS you understand her 24 hours a day.

Am I psychic? No. Tough!

C) This new roommate you are forced to tolerate cries all the time.

Cries and screams and SCREAMS. You. Can. Not. Shut. Her. Up.

D) If you try to kick her out, the government shows you her 18-year lease that you CANNOT BREAK!

I used to tape lists of seven-letter Scrabble words to my kid’s stroller at 2 a.m. and would have to run for two hours because it was the only way to get that screaming PoS to sleep.

But at least I would get better at Scrabble. “ETESIAN!”

E) This new roommate that you are required to love shits on the floor or shits in her weird plastic pants and expects you to clean it. She will cry for 24 straight hours if you don’t clean it.

If you don’t clean it, she dies.

F) You are expected to feed your new roommate at erratic times all day long and they have less motor control then than someone with no arms and no legs.

G) 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you are required to make sure this one-foot-tall human doesn’t kill themselves by mistake. If they do, then you will go to jail.

H) You have to touch their dirty sh*t-covered genitals when you clean them. Oh yeah, you have to clean them. A lot.

I) At night (if you are a man), your new roommate climbs in bed with the love of your life and sucks on her breasts.

If they were a normal roommate you might kick them out of your house at that point. But then you go to jail.

J) You and your spouse have gone from being “lovers” to being “parents.”

It’s the funnest thing in the world to be a lover. You can watch Game of Thrones all night. You can daydream. You can spend four hours at a bookstore.

Being a parent is about preventing death.

K) Your kid always wants to go to the beach.

You used to go to the beach and look at the ocean and think about how wonderful the planet is. Then read a thick, stupid novel.

Now you go to the beach and all you are allowed to do is prevent this tiny beast from drowning.

L) You have no idea if this one-foot-tall person will turn into someone you like or hate when they are five feet tall.

M) Dance recitals. Hundreds and hundreds of dance recitals with the other 50 million daughters on the planet in line before your daughter’s three seconds.

N) They want dogs. Dogs are similar to babies (sh*tting, crying, needing, puking, etc.) but smarter.

I have two daughters and three stepchildren and one dog.

They are the loves of my life.

The post What They Forgot to Tell You About Having Children appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/2KuOFrw via website design phoenix

How I Went From $0 to $15 Million and Then… Ugh

I had no business experience at all.

My job was to go out at 3 a.m. once a week and interview people: “What are you up to at 3 a.m.?”

I did that for four years. Once a week I’d put up the best interviews for that week on the HBO website.

It was a web show called III:am.

I had never done interviews before. I was always nervous just going up to someone in the middle of the night and saying, “Hi! Can I ask you what you are doing?”

I had a photographer with me.

One time I went up to a transvestite prostitute and she said the night was the only time she could leave her house.

She said she grew up in foster homes and was raped in every home since she was a kid.

“I didn’t know what sex I was by the time I got kicked out of foster care. The only place I could go was the street.”

A car went by and flashed its lights.

“Yoohoo!” she yelled at the car and it stopped and she got in.

---

Another guy was always out at 3 a.m. I ran into him no matter what part of town I was in.

I called him 24-Hour Kahadi.

He said, “People are trapped in the day. They wear their prison uniform. They go to their prison jobs. They go back home to their prison TV shows. They sleep. They repeat.”

He said, “For me, the people in the night are real. Each person is unique. Each night is a story.”

For him, 3 a.m. was a religion. A way of life.

For me, it started to be a way of life as well. The idea that the day has its strict societal rules but the night is for people who want to make their own rules.

---

Later HBO asked me to shoot a pilot for III:am.

Jon Alpert, a well-known documentary producer, was assigned the task of being my babysitter and producing the pilot.

He told me, “No talking heads ever!” Meaning: no interviews. We only shoot action.

I watched him do his magic. He put a mic on a prostitute so we could hear her with customers.

We once found a group of homeless kids at Tompkins Square Park, and when he found out they were upset at another group of kids, he suggested they all fight.

We went to Rikers Island, the jail. There’s a bus that goes every hour, 24 hours a day, from one stop in Queens to Rikers. No matter what time of day, if a prisoner got bailed out, he was released right then.

At the stop in Queens there were drug dealers and prostitutes always hanging out. They were waiting for their best customers to be released from jail.

One time I spoke to a girl who was a prostitute who was waiting for the bus. We were lit up by the neon lights from the Donut Time store that was the only store open at 3 a.m.

She was skipping up and down, happy, while she was talking to me. A small guy walked up to her and stood in between me and her.

Suddenly she shouted, “Ooohhhh!” like all the breath and life came out of her. She fell to the ground.

The guy said, “Hisss!” And she limped away, around a corner where it was just dark, and later, when I went to look, I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of me.

He said to me, “She’s none of your business.”

A construction worker with a neon vest and a hard hat came up to me. He flashed a badge. “We’re all over.”

The bus came, the doors opened, I got on it.

---

We kept the cameras hidden under the seats. A woman and her daughter were on the bus. “Our boy needs to get bailed out.”

“What did he do?”

“Somebody did something to someone,” said the daughter.

We got to Rikers Island. It was quiet. Everyone was quiet. The door opened and everyone got off.

Guards dragged a guy who had burns onto the bus.

The doors closed.

I sat down next to the guy with burns. “You OK?” He didn’t speak.

When the bus got to Rikers, he didn’t move. The bus driver said, “Oh geez.”

The guy was blinking. But he didn’t want to get off the bus. The driver called 911.

Police and the fire department and an ambulance showed up. “You have to get the cameras out of here,” yelled someone.

They carried the guy off the bus and put him in the ambulance. Put on the siren, and drove off.

“Another night,” the bus driver said, and he put the bus in gear and pulled away, back to Rikers Island.

---

What does this have to do with wealth?

Everything.

---

One time Comedy Central asked me to do for them what I did for HBO.

I had created HBO’s first intranet. I put all of its databases online and I installed Netscape on everyone’s computer. Most of the employees had never seen a web browser before.

On one page I set up, they could click in an actor’s name and see all the movies and shows he had been in. Click on a show and see all of the actors.

This was before IMDb.

The most popular page? I put on the database that managed the menu of HBO’s cafeteria.

Click on a day and see all the items on the menu.

Now the woman in charge of Comedy Central’s IT department said, “We’ll pay you.”

I said, “Give me the 3 a.m. time slot so I can do a talk show.”

“Really? We’ll pay you whatever you cost.”

“I only want the time slot. You only have infomercials there.”

“Let me ask.”

A week later she called me. “It went all the way up to the CEO,” she said. “He said no”.

---

My brother-in-law had a CD-ROM business. CD-ROMs were the same as CDs that had music but instead of music they had games or interactive presentations.

He was going out of business. I showed him what the web was. One Saturday I brought him to HBO and showed him the intranet I had made.

He had a friend of a friend who introduced us to Shlomo, who ran a wholesale diamond business on 47th Street.

Shlomo said, “I could be killed if they knew I was doing this.”

“They” were the 500 diamond retailers, mostly Hasidic Jews, who sold diamonds out of every storefront on 47th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenue. The Diamond District.

He explained to me everything about diamonds. The “4 Cs.” How he found cheap diamonds. How they were cut and cleaned and made ready for rings.

We made the website. It’s still at “diamondcutters dot com” although it looks different now after 24 years.

He gave us $35,000 in a brown paper bag. My brother in law took $17,500 and left me the rest in the bag.

I had $0 in my bank account. I was living in an apartment in Astoria, Queens and my only furniture was a foam mattress.

It was summer and I had no air conditioning (I don’t even think I had electricity) and every morning I’d wake up and my sweat would be soaked up by the foam of the mattress. The mattress was perpetually moist from my sweat.

I took my $17,500 and got a room at the Chelsea Hotel, which was known for letting artists, drug dealers, and prostitutes live there.

Stanley Bard, the owner, took my bag of cash and said, “Are you a drug dealer?”

“No,” I said, “I work at HBO.”

“Can you get us free cable?”

“Of course.”

He let me move in. It was illegal to live in a hotel but there were no rules at the Chelsea Hotel.

It was the best place I ever lived. I lived there for many, many years. It’s the only place i ever lived where most of my friends lived in the same building as me.

It’s the only place I ever lived where nobody told me the truth about anything.

The Chelsea Hotel

Now that I lived right in between HBO and my brother in law, we were in business. We called our business Reset.

Time to reset your business to take advantage of this new thing.

“What new thing?” everyone asked. JPMorgan asked. Sony asked. Warner Brothers asked.

“The internet,” I said. And then started to explain.

---

One for them. One for us.

We’d do Con Edison’s website for $300,000.

Then we’d do Fine Line Films for $1,000.

We’d do The Matrix for $250,000.

Then we made a website for fun called Shoebox. Two friends of mine from the Chelsea Hotel came over. One was a dominatrix and the other was a professional submissive.

They brought over 100 pairs of shoes. We photographed them licking each other’s shoes. We photographed Maria tied up while Veronica stood in 8-inch stilettos with a whip giving Maria water to drink.

One company, a Fortune 500 very conservative company, looked at Shoebox and said, “Make us a site like that!”

Nobody knew what they were doing.

We charged a lot of money.

We did websites for Loud Records (the Wu-Tang Clan), Bad Bad Records (Puffy), Interscope Records, Jive Records, BMG, Sony, we did Time Warner dot com, and many of New Line Cinemas movies.

We did Miramax (everyone was terrified Harvey Weinstein would hate the website). We did HBO’s website.

We were known in the industry for being the best at entertainment websites.

One time, Vadim, our first employee, came back from a shoot he did with Loud Records.

He walked in red and sweating. “That’s it!” he said, “I am not going to any more shoots where guns are randomly firing.”

I wanted to sell the company.

---

A year earlier I had written to Felice Kincannon, who was head of mergers and acquisitions at Omnicom and was focused on this new breed — the interactive agency. The web agency.

Omnicom had invested in Razorfish, Agency dot com, and a few others.

I met her for breakfast at the Palace Hotel, owned by the Sultan of Brunei. I loved the pancakes there.

“Maybe you are too small for us now,” she said.

“I understand,” I said and for the next hour I asked her questions about herself, her job, what she was looking for, details about the ad agency business, which I knew nothing about.

I knew nothing at all about any business.

We did the websites for the Wu-Tang Clan back in 1997

---

For the next year I would send her a monthly letter. We got X new clients. We went up Y% in revenues. We moved offices to handle our growth, etc.

Every six months we’d meet for breakfast. I asked her more questions.

I met with accountants to learn what deals looked like.

What sort of money did companies pay? Oh! They pay also in stock? Oh! They sometimes pay over time to make sure we keep our customers?

I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything.

Every week I would arrange lunch or dinner with different competitors. Companies who also made websites.

There were only a few of us. We all knew each other. We all competed on every single deal.

We were frenemies. We were co-opetition.

We’d ask each other questions. We tried to make deals with each other. I’ll give you these clients if you give me those. You heard what about who? He got that client? You are using what technology?

New industries grow up together. We were all in the same sandbox. I’m still better friends with some of my competitors from then than some of my best friends from then.

Later, whenever one of us got acquired, we all got acquisition offers.

---

Finally, Felice at Omnicom was interested in buying Reset.

She introduced me to various agencies that Omnicom owned.

We got four offers. My mom said, “Who is going to pay for your business?”

“But Mom,” I said, “We just got a $9 million offer.”

A stockbroker from Prudential kept calling me. I never called him back.

Finally I picked up the phone and he said, “Jesus, you’d think your Warren Buffett, you never call me back.”

He wanted to help me sell my company. He wanted a 5% cut. “OK,” I said.

He set me up on three meetings. All of them visited our office. I set up a map and put needles in all the parts of the world where we had clients.

Werner, who made an offer, looked at the map and said in his thick German accent, “There’s a lot of business in New York City. You don’t need to travel all over.”

I learned so much from people with 40 more years’ business experience than me.

Then the worst period of my life (up until then) began.

---

“We’ll close the deal in just a few weeks,” he said. “It’s just legal paperwork.”

I was so happy. I had never had money before.

I had paid for my college. I graduated in three years to avoid another year of borrowing. I had taken six courses a semester and took two courses every summer while working 40 hours a week to survive.

I moved to NYC in 1994 with nothing in my pocket. My first room in NYC was a room I shared with Elias, a chess hustler from Washington Square Park. He slept on the couch, I slept on the futon.

I had a garbage bag full of clothes. Every morning I’d pull a crumpled suit out of the garbage bag and then walk to HBO so as to save on the $1 subway money.

Elias and I would play chess all night.

It was one of my favorite times in life. And I had zero money at all.

“Just a few short weeks,” Werner promised in March 1998.

---

It was horrible. Every week there were new delays. New tricks. New traps.

To sell a company, you have to get approval from your landlord. Why? Because now they will have a new tenant.

Our landlord didn’t want to give approval. He was a “garmento” who worked on 38th and 9th.

I’d sit outside his office all day and wouldn’t leave until he gave approval. Werner kept calling me, “Did you get your landlord’s permission?” I would say, “Yes.” “OK, send it over.” And I’d hang up. And wait. And at night I would cry. I was afraid.

“Tell me the stock buying you,” the landlord finally said. He wanted to buy it.

I didn’t know what to say. I said I can tell you as soon as deal is done. He signed the permission.

---

We had to sign a document saying that all of our employees had been insured.

But Adrian had forgotten to pay insurance for the past few months. All of our employees thought they were insured but they weren’t. And our insurance company wouldn’t take us back.

I didn’t know what to do. I forget how we solved that problem. If we even solved it or just signed the document anyway.

---

Russia debt collapsed in the summer of 1998. The market was going straight down.

“The internet might be over!” Werner told me on the phone.

“No,” I said, “it isn’t. We are getting more business than ever.”

But, in truth, our clients were disappearing or not renewing with us.

“Let me see your contracts,” Werner’s lawyer would say. But we had no contracts.

We had agreed to the deal in March. April, May passed. July 4 passed. August.

I couldn’t sleep anymore and would walk around all night. And I was still doing my III:am show for HBO.

I used to be a morning person. But now I was one of the 3 a.m. people.

We did the website for The Matrix for $200,000

---

“Do you need money?” Werner said. “We could give you a loan.”

“No,” I said, although I was dying to say “YES!” But I thought it was a trap.

“Are you sure?” he said.

It was definitely a trap.

---

I made many, many mistakes. Mistakes every day. If I listed all the mistakes it wouldn’t even be a book. It would be a horror movie.

One mistake, though: I said we were a “web services agency.”

But lazy people make more money than hard workers.

I was lazy and I had built all sorts of software to help me quickly make websites.

Think WordPress but it was 1998 instead of 2015. My software allowed me to pick templates and add all sorts of features to a website and upload images and designs with just a click.

But I didn’t tell anyone because it would only take me an hour or so to do a website and we’d charge $270,000 as if it had taken us months.

I thought I was smart.

But software companies were going for hundreds of millions of dollars. Software can scale. Agencies can’t.

We sold on August 31, 1998 for $6 million in stock.

I was so happy.

---

The stock went up and down. In 1999 I bought the most expensive apartment I could buy in NYC.

It was three blocks from the World Trade Center. Nancy, the real estate agent, said, “Prices will never go down. Manhattan is an island and you will live in the best location.”

I said to Nancy, “But what if a plane hits the World Trade Center and the building comes down?” I wasn’t being prophetic. Just paranoid.

“You can’t live your life that way,” she said. So I bought the apartment.

My apartment back then

---

The low of the stock after I sold Reset was $2 a share. I had 450,000 shares.

In February of 2000 the stock reached a high of $48. I sold almost all of my stock then.

I looked at the money sitting in my Prudential stock market account.

I kept hitting reload. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“We’re done,” I said to my then-wife. “We did it.” I had been broke all of my life. Now this cash was sitting in my account. All cash. I had cashed out. Cash.

I had a daughter. I loved her. I loved everything.

Two years later I was dead broke. I was losing my home. The smoke from the old World Trade Center was still shooting itself into the sky a few blocks away.

Many things happened between 1998 and 2002. Amazing, exciting things. I have many stories. I made many friends.

In the summer of 2002, none of those new friends were around anymore. They all disappeared. Nobody would return my calls.

I didn’t want to think that people liked me for just money. But many people liked me just because I had money.

One time I needed to buy diapers for my daughters. I forgot which brand so I used a payphone to call my then-wife.

I picked up the phone and put it next to my ear but there was no dial tone. Something felt sticky in my head and ear.

I pulled the phone away. It was covered in shit. My ears and hair and cheek were now covered in shit. I hung up the phone and went home.

I forgot how to smile. I forgot how to find happiness tucked away in the laughter of my daughters. I wanted to be alone. I was nothing.

I was dead broke and needed to figure out a way to bounce back.

That was then.

The post How I Went From $0 to $15 Million and Then… Ugh appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/2Xo8gzx via website design phoenix

The 10 Commandments of the American Religion

I want freedom.

Since birth: society, the government, corporations, teachers, colleagues all have their own agendas. Instinctively, they try to give us those agendas.

I try to be a greedy skeptic.

Skepticism leads to freedom. Leads to entrepreneurship. Leads to freedom.

Skepticism allows you to blaze your own unique path in between the layers of reality and these false commandments that society imposes on us.

Most importantly, have fun, build community, improve every day, and find your own commandments for freedom.

I) OWNING A HOME

“The America Dream.”

“It’s a good investment,” and, “ROOTS!”

But…

• It’s a lot more money than one should put in any investment
• It often requires borrowing more than your net worth
• There are hidden costs to owning the investment: property taxes, maintenance costs, and in some cases, interest rate changes
• It’s illiquid (you can’t get your money back easily). In fact, it’s most illiquid right when you need the money the most (like in a recession).

There are exceptions and anecdotes.

And it’s so ENTICING.

The white picket fence, the garden, the room for each child, the backyard where the kids can play, the pool, ROOTS, etc.

Why is it so drilled in us? What has been the benefit to society to brainwash us?

a) There is a $15 TRILLION mortgage industry. Think of $15 trillion making 5% interest. That’s $750 BILLION a year that is fed into the banks by people who own homes with mortgages.

They do not want to lose that.

b) PRISONER. Corporations don’t want good employees to leave. When it was less possible to work remotely so your job prospects were limited to local corporations, the corporation would encourage employees to own homes.

If you can’t move easily, you can’t look for jobs far away that might have better salaries.

Less mobility kept salaries down across the country, kept employees more willing to put up with jobs they didn’t like.

BUT, but… it’s the American Dream.

II) GOING TO COLLEGE

I won’t repeat everything I’ve said on this topic. But…

1. 22 million Americans owe student loan debt
2. Student loan debt has gone from $100 billion in 1999 to $1.6 TRILLION now
3. Tuitions are up 2.5x since 1999, much greater than inflation. Are colleges 2.5x better?
4. 44% of the jobs graduates get don’t require a college degree
5. 94% of all new jobs being created in the economy do not require a college degree
6. Graduating with such high debt discourages young people from starting businesses. New business creation is at its lowest rate in decades and this has typically been the fuel of the economy.

Again, why has society brainwashed us?

• The money being made on student loans
• High schools are often funded and ranked based on their ability to send kids to college. So our kids, when they are most impressionable, are encouraged by underqualified counselors and teachers that college is worth the cost no matter what
• The college educated often come from the top 10% of wealth in the country
• Colleges put out many false studies showing the benefits of college. These are shared by teachers, administrators, counselors to kids who are not capable of finding the flaws in these studies.

III) VOTING

I don’t vote. I am repeatedly vote shamed. People say, “You aren’t entitled to an opinion if you don’t want to vote for change.”

OK.

But…

Everyone has opportunities to be active in their local communities and work for the change they want.

Also, there are more forums than ever to write and share ideas. One vote in 100 million won’t make any difference. But writing and DOING activities will make change.

“But what if everyone felt that way? Then what?”

Nothing.

IV) THE FDA

The FDA tests drugs for safety, effectiveness, etc. before a company is allowed to sell them and doctors are allowed to prescribe them.

But the costs of approving a drug are growing. If you develop a cancer drug, it can cost $2.6 billion (up from $800 million in 2003) and 10 years to get it approved by the FDA.

This makes drugs more expensive. Up to tens of thousands of dollars for life-saving drugs.

Healthcare costs are up 3x more than inflation in the past 40 years.

Some problems:

1. Good drugs + bad companies = they won’t be able to raise enough money to get a drug approved. So many good drugs will never save the lives of the patients they intended to help.
2. How good is the FDA? On average 4,500 drugs and devices are pulled by the FDA each year. These drugs were already approved.

Perhaps people in extreme medical situations should be allowed to take drugs that come from peer-approved research. Then, via real-life experiences, society can determine which drugs are working.

V) CHARITY

Believe in giving and helping others.

BUT… people often blindly give to charities (or perhaps are shamed at the cash register or the Facebook birthday page when someone asks, “Will you give $1 to XYZ charity”?)

I feel like I am charity shamed every day.

Not all charities are created equally:

• Some charities do not distribute their money effectively. (E.g. charities that donate to help impoverished people in third world countries but the money is stolen by corrupt governments is a typical example)
• Some charities, like some businesses, are poorly run
• Some charities spend too much money on administration and marketing so only a tiny portion of your money is put to good use.

My favorite way to donate to charity is through what I call “micro-charities.”

Find a specific situation where you can help and where the majority of the money given is put to immediate use.

For instance, someone you know is uninsured, needs surgery, and sets up a GoFundMe page to help finance it.

Should you do it anonymously?

I don’t know. In many religions it is considered the highest form of good to give anonymously.

But there is some evidence to suggest that if your circle of acquaintances know you donated , then they are likely to donate.

I hate to feel like I am “bragging” about donating so I tend to be as anonymous as possible but it’s case by case.

VI ) THE CONSTITUTION

People swear by the Constitution. When it agrees with them.

“Freedom of speech!” is probably the most overused and wrongly used phrase on Facebook.

“This is unconstitutional!”

The Constitution was written in a different time by a bunch of slave owners with no knowledge of what technology would bring this country.

Which is why there is an Amendment system.

When people don’t like the Constitution, they simply amend it in Congress and then the states vote and then the Amendment is added to the Constitution.

So the Constitution is followed, until it isn’t.

The Constitution has been distorted by every president since George Washington. The Supreme Court attempts to keep these distortions in check.

But it’s a living document and not a bunch of rules handed down by a fake god.

VII) WARS

Since World War II, the U.S. has considered itself the police force of the world.

The last legally declared war in the United States was in 1941 when we entered World War II.

All of the rest have been “executive orders” that have been approved by Congress.

This may be right or wrong. A community needs law enforcement. And the world is a global community.

There are historians who can debate every aspect of this.

But if you think of the interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and many other places, it’s often unclear what good we did. Or what bad.

1. For instance, was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 so destabilizing in the region that it gave Iran and organizations like ISIS too much power that we had to ultimately (and still) deal with much later?
2. Was the help we provided in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s giving too much power to the Afghani rebels who ultimately turned into Al-Qaeda?

This is unclear.

One thing we know: providing economic development to poor countries tends to create better allies than invasions do.

VIII) IDENTITY POLITICS

This quote from a Communist newspaper in 1922 is taken from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

“Do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.”

Solzhenitsyn was a dissident who was sentenced to Siberia. The Gulag Archipelago is his account of it.

He mentions this quote because it was a signal of the dangers of fascism, which was about to begin its reign of terror on Russia.

The quote almost sounds like it can be written now on any college campus in America. And most Facebook groups.

IX) “THE FOURTH BRANCH”

Everybody yells “fake news” about every article they don’t agree with.

The newspaper industry has declined from about $60 billion in revenues in 2000 to approximately $25 billion in 2019.

The result:

1. More biased publications to ensure greater loyalty among extremist subscribers
2. Lower salaries for reporters, forcing quality reporters to seek employment elsewhere
3. The rise of many online sites with unclear biases that often use very sophisticated algorithms to generate topic ideas that will generate the most clicks as opposed to the most honest news. And…
4. THERE ARE NO CREDIBLE SOURCES ANY MORE.

I spent time backstage at a popular news show.

The producer whispered to me, “My entire job is to just fill up the time between ads.”

The news that withstands the test of time often result in books.

People ask, “But how do you stay informed?”

Believe me, people will bring up the things they think you should be informed on. And the “news” won’t help you understand these issues. Only sincere curiosity will.

For a long time the press was considered “the fourth branch” — a way to keep a check on the government through investigative reporting like in the Woodward and Bernstein days of investigating Watergate.

The news industry is in decline and despair now.

Read books.

X) DYSTOPIAS

• Global warming
• Patriarchy
• Fascism. (“In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives…”―Stephen King, The Running Man)
• Immigration taking over
• Loss of all privacy. (“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’―Philip K. Dick)
• Overpopulation
• Genetically created weapons of mass destruction
• Radical religious terrorism taking over the world
• Genetically modified humans
• A.I.
• Etc.

There’s a basis of truth in many of these worries.

Are the worries justified? Maybe. Sometimes. Possibly.

But these are also the phrases used to manipulate the masses.

I tend to believe the last thing I am told. I am easy to manipulate. I always have to remind myself to be skeptical.

To do my own research.

To love my children so they become good people.

The post The 10 Commandments of the American Religion appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/31EJTgn via website design phoenix

Me and Jessica Biel — A Love Story

I am not going to make fun of Jessica Biel.

Her first film was called A Woman of No Importance. Her skills in that movie launched her now very impressive career.

I saw a headline: “California legislators confer with Jessica Biel about vaccine legislation.”

I didn’t understand it. Was it Jessica Biel, the biologist?

Was it Jessica Biel, the state senator from Los Angeles who was dealing with various Measles outbreaks in her district?

No, it was our Jessica Biel. The one we love. The one I love.

She had a position on vaccines (against) and it needed to be heard.

—

Right at the moment when they were going to pass the pro-vaccine bill, did all the California State Senate suddenly shake out of their stupor?

Did one of them call another and say, “Dave! What were we thinking? Did we forget to get advice from Jessica Biel about this?”

Did voters call up Senate offices and say, “Wait! I need to know where Jessica Biel stands on this. Have you guys talked to her yet? What did I vote you into office for?”

Again: not making fun of her. She’s a great movie star. Watch A Woman of No Importance. It’s important.

I’m just jealous.

Didn’t even one state senator call another and say, “Hey, ummm, did anyone remember to give James Altucher a call on this topic? I mean, he knows nothing but shouldn’t we at least give him a shout?”

And the only thing that senator heard on the other side of the phone was dead silence.

—

Because, let’s be real for a second.

We all know vaccines work.

BUT…

Pretend you are a brand new mother. You are holding your little puddle of sh*t and flesh who cries, can’t speak English, and is now your total responsibility for the next 18–30 years.

A doctor you don’t recognize walks up to you and says, “Come here. Don’t worry. Give me that little sack of skin you can barely hold onto.”

Blindly, you hand over your child to the man in the white lab coat.

He takes a two foot needle, stabs your little baby with it. The baby starts screaming in agony.

“What…!” you start to say.

The man in the white lab coat looks up at you, needle fully compressed into your baby.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m just injecting the deadly polio virus that crippled millions and millions of people right into your baby. It will all be ok.”

That sounds scary.

I’d be scared.

—

My mom had polio. Because she had a very hard time walking, she had a very bad limp for her entire life. She had many difficulties in life because of polio.

When she was two, she had to have her birthday behind a glass wall. So nobody could be exposed to her.

Her legs break easily.

It tainted everything in her life. It’s the first thing anyone would notice about her.

Friends would tease me at the school bus stop. “Why does your mom walk like that?”

If she had been born three years later, she wouldn’t have gotten polio. Jonas Salk had invented the vaccine.

—

I just want to know: Why do they call Jessica Biel and not my mom?

Or why can’t they call me?

People say, “Vote if you want your opinion heard.”

Apparently it doesn’t work that way.

So from this day forward I am going to make sure I am heard.

I am going to have one goal and I am going to pursue it more furiously than I have pursued any goal ever before in my entire life.

I’m going to be a beautiful movie star.

—

ALSO… I first posted this on Facebook and it got a LOT of comments. I wanted to share some of them with you, but there are too many. But if you want to read them, here is the original post.

The post Me and Jessica Biel — A Love Story appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/2KNalhJ via website design phoenix

What to Do When People Hate You

I got an email, “You’re ugly. Shut the F up.”

It was the first time I got hate mail. I had an opinion about the stock market, wrote it, then got this email. It was 2002.

I showed a friend of mine. “That’s a badge of honor. It means people are paying attention to you.”

“Or it could just mean people think I’m ugly.”

—

In 2005, in a column in The Financial Times, I wrote that I didn’t think kids should go to college.

Student loan debt was around $300 billion then. Now it’s over $1.5 TRILLION.

Tuitions are two times higher now than then. Acceptance rates are lower.

And yet, in 2019 almost all new jobs being created in the economy don’t require a college degree.

But this was 2005.

Many people hated me. I lost friends. I got death threats.

People would say things like, “He went to college so now he just wants people not to go to college so he can remain superior.”

People said things like, “He must have done bad in college.”

People said things like, “Not everything’s about money!”

Colleges stopped inviting me to speak on their campuses.

—

I wrote an article on why people shouldn’t own a home.

If you paid all of your life savings to own a home then you probably hated me after that.

I spoke about it on Yahoo! Finance in a video that got millions of views and over 10,000 comments.

My friends told me, “Whatever you do, don’t look at the comments!”

I looked at the comments. I looked at them for hours. I threw up afterwards.

—

In 2009 I went on CNBC and said the market was going to go up.

A lot of people hated me.

One person called a friend of mine and said, “Everyone is laughing at your friend.”

I said, “Did you defend me?”

“No way, man!” he said, “I want to go out with that girl.”

I was really upset that he didn’t defend me.

—

In August 2017, I went on CNBC to talk about Bitcoin. I said there were a lot of alternatives to Bitcoin that were scams but that Bitcoin would go up.

Bitcoin was $3,500 then and about $8,000 now. And 80% of the alternative currencies around then are out of business because they were scams.

I wasn’t right about everything but I was right about the direction.

A lot of people hated me.

They hated me because they hated Bitcoin. Or they hated me for ads I made for a course that would explain cryptocurrencies to the average person.

One time I got so upset at all the hate I put my phone number on Twitter and told people to call me if they had a problem with me.

I spoke on the phone from 3 a.m. until about 8 a.m.

What good did it do?

To this day I get at least one hate mail a day about Bitcoin.

—

One time I wrote that I was against all wars.

One person wrote, “Even the Peloponnesian War?”

What?

Another friend wrote me and said, “If you said that in the bar I go to each night, we’d kick your ass.”

Another friend never wrote me. He had been my friend for decades. Even a best friend.

I finally realized he had unfriended me everywhere. I wrote and said, “What happened?”

He said, “You must want slavery if you are against the Civil War?”

What?

“You’ve known me for decades. How could you possibly think that?”

He didn’t answer. People who hate don’t change their minds.

• They are afraid their view of the world is wrong.
• They are afraid they spent huge amounts of money without needing to.
• They don’t like who you are for some reason that you have no idea about.
• They think it will make them feel better to not like you.
• They think it will make them more accepted in their group to not like you.
• They think you are directly insulting them.
• They think you are stupid and they are smart.
• They think your view will hurt them in some way.
• Maybe (cliche) they are jealous.

I don’t like it when people trash me or say horrible things to me or treat me poorly. It hurts me almost every day.

I need to get over it. I’m getting better at it.

I’ve learned a few things:

A) Never ask “Why?” Nobody is ever going to tell you the real reason they dislike you. They might not even know.

B) Never argue back. What’s the point?

C) Some relationships end.

D) Listen to them. I’ve often changed my mind when people are reasonable.

E) Move forward. In physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

When you move forward, someone will always try to move against you.

This is why success is so hard. To be successful, you will have every force in the world move against you.

Learning to ignore the haters, not fight them, and just take the very next steps, is the key to success.

F) Ignore. Ignorance is bliss. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.

Ignore the people behind you so you can move forward.

—

I felt all alone many times. I felt depressed. So depressed I simply didn’t have the emotional infrastructure inside of me to get out of bed.

I lost friends and I would make the mistake of calling them and asking “Why?” when there was no answer.

I’d try to argue and plead but it just dug my grave.

The only thing that works (foreshadowing: it’s a cliche): figure out more ways to help people.

When other people are hate machines, I try to let that be the fuel of my “help machine.” I remind myself of this when I get hate.

But that first guy was right. I looked in the mirror today. Ugh.

The post What to Do When People Hate You appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/2XDJ7Ol via website design phoenix

5 Reasons I Don’t Go to Doctors

I haven’t had a checkup since I was 16 years old. Not because I’m so healthy. But because doctors kill people.

On paper, being a doctor seems pretty great. The money is good, it makes everyone around you feel inferior, and you get a diploma that literally gives you permission to play God.

But…

5. DOCTORS HATE YOU, AND THEY HATE THEIR LIVES

On average, one doctor a day kills himself. Despite what you hear about lawyers, doctors actually have the highest suicide rate, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s even worse among female doctors. You think they like looking at you with your clothes off? You’re disgusting.

The suicide rate among female doctors is 2.3 times the national average, and the suicide rate of male doctors is 1.4 times higher.

Dr. Charles Reynolds, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and, statistically speaking, a likely suicide waiting to happen, says, “Undiagnosed and untreated depression is the culprit here.”

So now we need doctors just to diagnose doctors.

And why all the suicide? Why can’t they just drink their problems away, like normal people?

4. YOUR DOCTOR MIGHT BE DRUNK

Uh oh.

In a study done on the American College of Surgeons, 15% of male surgeons and 26% of female surgeons suffered from alcohol abuse and dependence.

That might not seem super high, but it is higher than the national average.

What’s more alarming is that a significant portion reported having errors during surgery in the prior three months because of their dependence.

The stress of being a doctor and being responsible for saving lives drove these doctors to drink, which, in turn, contributed to mistakes made in surgery.

Which likely drove them to even MORE drinking, and now we’re on an infinity loop of drunk doctors cutting noses off, or taking out a colon by mistake, before going off to drink away their stress.

[Side note: Could the reason for the surgical mask be that doctors don’t want you to smell alcohol on their breath? Food for thought.]

If you want to be safe, it turns out you should be operated on by someone who is male, has children, and specializes in operating on veterans.

For some reason, these are the people least likely to be drunk while operating on you.

3. I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

People make mistakes, and we’re not going to vilify doctors because they’re human; most of my best friends are human. That said, 98,000 PEOPLE DIE EVERY YEAR from mistakes doctors make.

98,000. I’d be depressed if I killed people all day by mistake.

A mistake is defined as a death that could have been preventable.

Either a mistake in surgery or a mistake in a prescription or some other weird mistake. One study showed that if you randomly pull 100 medical charts, 40 would contain evidence of doctor errors.

Would we trust a pilot who makes an error 40% of the time?

The death can come in surprising forms, too. You know how you look at the chicken scratches on the prescription pad, and you think, “How can anyone read that?”

But for some reason you trust that your pharmacist has this supernatural power to read doctor’s handwriting? Well… he doesn’t.

According to a study done by the National Academies of Science Institutes of Medicine, more than 7,000 deaths occur each year because the pharmacist couldn’t decipher the prescription and gave you an overdose of some weird chemotherapy pill instead of Viagra.

A good rule of thumb: If you can’t read it, then your pharmacist can’t read it.

2. YOUR DOCTOR IS PROBABLY OBESE

There’s nothing wrong with being obese. But it will kill you. And doctors know that.

Obesity causes everything from diabetes to heart attacks to strokes and is linked to early onset Alzheimer’s.

And yet, doctors have a death wish — 53% of doctors, despite knowing all of this, are obese (according to the Obesity Research Journal).

And you put yourself in their care.

Why should it matter if doctors are obese?

In a sample of patients who are overweight, ONLY 7% of the overweight doctors would diagnose their patients as overweight.

As opposed to more than 90% of the doctors who were not overweight.

Frankly, even someone with a medical degree could give the simple medical advice of “stop smoking and eat less” and have a healthier patient in almost every case.

But the reality is, overweight doctors don’t give that advice.

1. GOING ON VACATION KILLS EVEN MORE PEOPLE

In medical circles (trust me, I’m a fake doctor) it’s known as the “July Effect.”

In the U.K. they refer to it as the “August Killing Season.”

Results show that patients get worse care in these months, particularly at teaching hospitals.

Why? For the dumbest and most obvious reason: Doctors go on vacation in July. That means interns become residents and residents pretend to be the real doctors.

So you’re a doctor — a big, fat, sad, suicidal doctor — and all you want to do is take some time off, but, hey, you can’t. Because when you take time off, more people die.

Deaths from surgery and malpractice skyrocket in July, so as long as you can avoid getting sick or injured in the summertime, you should be fine.

Or better yet, make sure you ONLY get sick in areas where doctors might be vacationing. Hawaii is a great place to get the plague in July.

—

One time I was walking around outside wearing a lab coat.

A guy came up to me, clutching his shoulder. He told me his shoulder was hurting. He asked me what he should do.

I give him my professional opinion.

“Stretch it every morning when you wake up. Take at least two ibuprofen a day. It should feel better in a week or so.”

“Thank you!” he said and he and his wife started walking away.

“Hey,” I said and he turned around, “after about two weeks, if it still hurts, go see a doctor.”

I don’t want to be sued for malpractice.

The post 5 Reasons I Don’t Go to Doctors appeared first on James Altucher.

from James Altucher http://bit.ly/2EQttaM via website design phoenix